She uncovers widespread attention to the environment one creates in one’s home, to being comfortable on one’s own, to being honest with and supportive of others, to respecting and supporting the many contributions people can make to society, to the creative process and getting feedback about what one is learning, and to celebrating the creativity that is everywhere, if one looks. In ecosynomics terms, these are co-hosting the five primary relationships. The global Agreements Health Check survey (from 124 countries) shows that as people get better at co-hosting the five primary relationships, they experience greater vibrancy, more hygge. I highly recommend this fun, well written discovery of the secrets of living vibrantly every day, even where it is very cold.

What is a human being? What does it mean to be a human being? How do we know? How do we know when human actions are good, beautiful, or true? Big questions. Questions the answers to which guide what human beings do–everyone, everywhere, everyday–whether they are aware of this guidance or not. If these questions so deeply and continuously impact everything, maybe it would be good to be aware of what they are, who is asking then, what answers people are coming up with, and how those answers impact each of us. Maybe.

The above books, in chronological order, provided a highly recommended excursion through the development of a way of looking at these big questions. In his political philosophy, Locke provides an early view, in the 1600s, of human beings capable of making healthy decisions on their own, without divine guidance from the king or church. Locke’s Essay provides the moral-philosophical foundations of this view of the human being–what a human is, how humans understand the world, and how this knowledge influences what humans are capable of deciding.

Kant provides a very logical structure, in the 1700s, for understanding what a human being should do, based on reason, an expression at the end of the age of enlightenment, furthering the idea that human beings are completely capable of developing their own moral philosophy. Kant explores, through reason, the emerging terms of freedom, the rights and duties of people and of the state, and their relationship to the law.

Lewin applies the emerging concepts of energy fields and topology in the early 1900s to the behavior of human beings, finding that there is both the inner experience and an outer structure or environment, which mutually influence each other, and, to a great part, influence the behavior of the human being. The human being has its own internal processes and is influenced by and influences its external environment, a region around it, and this interplay influences the human’s behavior. This takes the purely rational human or the purely influenced human and blends them.

Bauman in the new millennium brings the fluid nature of reality into the question of what humans are and what they are capable of, finding that both the descriptions of humans and the structures that support them are based on static, stable frameworks, whereas reality is fluid, and so should be the understanding of humanity and structures of the individual, work and the community.

Bartow brings back the questions of long ago to today, developing a picture of the human as the natural manifestation of spirit, conscious and unconscious of the reality the human being interacts with and as part of. This framework blends what is known from modern science and the wisdom traditions about what makes up reality and the role of human beings in it.

While these are challenging reads, they are well worth the effort, to see where we have come from in our understanding of being human, where we are now, and where we might be heading. Honing our axiology of what we are, and how we can live the life available to us.

In ecosynomic terms, the first step in any societal effort to change the agreements at the foundation of human interaction is to understand the deeper shared purpose, the love for a future to which people give their will. The second step is to bring together the people who are necessary for realizing that deeper shared purpose. Dr. Waddell finds four strategies for who is necessary to change societal agreements to achieve that deeper shared purpose. These four strategies are based on two continua: from confrontation to collaboration; from destruction to creation. One can work to shift agreements working apart (confrontation) or together (collaboration), and generating new agreements (creation) or removing old agreements (destruction). The article provides two case studies of large systems change, where all four strategies played out in the system over time. A key insight is that changing major systems of agreements probably requires a range of pathways to tangibilize the deeper shared purpose–different ways to achieve the same impact. These different ways require different capacities, ways of interacting, ways of seeing the world. In large-systems change, the entrepreneur, the warrior, the missionary, and the lover–the four archetypes Waddell identifies with the four change strategies–all bring their particular worldview, organizing forms, and energy at particular times. One form is not superior to the others, rather they each bring a part of the overall game.

Some ideas are really hard to grasp. Advanced math. Particle physics. Moral philosophy. Or at least the ideas seem to be hard to grasp. Most of the time, I seem to buy into the idea that only highly trained experts can even begin to have a clue about some of these ideas. I no longer believe this to be true. I find that it is more a matter of storytelling. I do not need to understand all of the nuances of something to find it interesting and to be able to relate to it.

I find that there are a few ways to tell stories. Three of them make it almost impossible to engage with the hard ideas.

Some writers water down the ideas. Just the bullet points, in 140 characters or less. I think of this as the “American coffee” story. Not much there.

Some make the ideas hard to swallow. Let me show you how smart I am. This is the “cod liver oil” story. Not much fun to take in.

Some overwhelm the senses. The 18 secrets to success. Everything that I randomly can think of to tell you about what I know. This is the “half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon” story or the “notice the aged cinnamon in the roasted jalapeño Oaxacan chili mole” story. Too many details I cannot connect, so it is also off-putting.

Then there are storytellers that engage me, awaken my interest, and help me make connections that I did not have before. They do not water down the ideas; they dig in quite a bit. They do not make the ideas hard to swallow; they sweeten them up with anecdotes, with context for why this is meaningful to know in my life, and even a few little insider secrets. They do not overwhelm the senses, rather building up my understanding through a scaffolding of insights. At the end, I see something I did not see before, and I have an engagement with the ideas that I did not have before. While I could be upset that years of formal education did not give me the insights gleaned from a few hours of reading, I decided to be grateful that I have them now.

I have just finished reading the three books listed above. They all do a great job at this. Cornell University professor of math Steven Strogatz gave me an overview of the world of basic math principles, from grade school through graduate school, and an appreciation for how I can use it for my own understanding of the world and in my research that I did not have. I had the tools, which I now grok at a whole new level.

Harvard University professor of theoretical physics Lisa Randall gave me a deeper understanding of particle physics, string theory, and multi-dimensional realities than I had gained after reading dozens of books on the subject. What I had as a bunch of somewhat disconnected ideas, now fit together into a clean, clear picture.

I had never tried to read the great philosophers until recently. While some are very hard to read, Immanuel Kant’s very structured logic and careful building of a frame works very well for me. Not only was I able to see farther into the world of Kant’s philosophy and its repercussions through the years, I also benefitted from his structuring of a very challenging idea, of a moral philosophy for humanity.

It is a joy to explore the often-hidden depths of what it is to be alive, and it is even more fun to follow those warped passages when guided by great storytellers.

Are the agreements that we live with today, whether consciously chosen or unconsciously accepted, the only agreements that are possible? Are they “true,” in the sense that they are the only way that life could be? While we tend to unconsciously act as if they were given truths, I find that all of these agreements have shifted over time. Whether the laws of physics, the laws of medicine, the laws of economics, or the laws of politics, they all change, and often by a lot. This constant reframing of what we “know” to be true intrigues me, so I have been looking into the history of thought and practice in many of these disciplines.

I recently recommended a book that explored the evolution of the modern mind. A wild ride through the wars and tectonic shifts in how we define what a mind is. I also recommend two books exploring how we arrived at our current-day understanding of two very influential systems, which we also tend to assume are given facts of reality: the US Constitution and modern economics.

Professor Klarman, of the Harvard Law School, digs deep into the archives, through hundreds of letters from the framers of the US Constitution to describe, in the words of the framers themselves, the process that the framers went through to get from the Articles of Confederation to a ratified Constitution. It was not a forgone conclusion that the convention could legally happen, that they would reach an agreement, or that the document would be ratified. They just knew that the Articles of Confederation were not working, with bankruptcy and civil war imminent, and little else had worked. “By 1787, a decade’s worth of failed efforts at securing incremental reform within the framework of the Articles had convinced many political leaders of the need to pursue more fundamental change–and through other avenues” (p 72). Where many of the states were moving towards democratic systems of local decision making, and many of the political leaders did not support a strong federal model, the framers were successful in changing the foundations of the USA going forward. To get this highly negotiated document ratified, “invocations of divine inspiration for the Constitution by supporters of ratification, were, at least in part, a conscious political strategy to maximize the chance of winning” (p 2). While the Constitution has proved to be a very strong document, its framers wanted it to be revisited soon and strengthened, seeing it only as a better temporary solution than the Articles of Confederation.

While Professor Klarman’s archive-rich narrative includes 181 pages of endnotes, making it a long, nuanced read, London School of Economics guest lecturer Kishtainy‘s A Little History of Economics covers a wide spread of history in a few pages, highlighting key thinkers and tinkerers along the way, showing how they took a legacy of key concepts and the pressing issues of their times, to mold a new perspective on how people come together to produce and exchange goods. It is the idea in a context that made huge shifts that we then consider normal or given today, many years later in a completely different context. “Before Jevons and Marshall, economists imagined people as colorful characters. In Adam Smith’s version of competition, merchants haggle and hustle to make the best deals, and Malthus’s poor liked to breed like rabbits. Now economists place a new character at centre stage: ‘rational economic man,’ a person who decides what to do by weighing up marginal costs and marginal benefits, for example by comparing the price of a spoon with its utility. The economy was seen as being full of cool-headed people who do all these calculations perfectly. This kinds of economy looks calm and harmonious, quite different from how earlier economists saw it. To Marx capitalism was all about the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Workers create the economic value, but capitalists take most of it as profit. In the world of ‘rational economic man’ there are simply lots of people buying and selling things. There’s no such thing as exploitation” (p 65).

Another coup. Take one idea, add some content and a new context, stir, and change the game. We then accept the new game, and forget that there ever was a previous game that others previously also thought was true and given. Two highly recommended books on the history of thought underlying major institutions today.

For thousands of years, we had the rich inner pictures we perceived from elaborate storytelling. Then there were the 2D images in black-and-white then in color on the big movie screen. Now we have 3D images popping out at us, from screens big and little. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, Bryanton jumps way past 2D and 3D to 10D, inviting us to imagine the 10D reality that physicists tell us we live in, and possible implications of that 10D reality.

For the timid of mind, Bryanton starts by warning the reader that, “anyone wanting to dismiss the levels of detail we are imagining in these pages as ‘too extravagant’ would do well to keep in mind how extraordinarily, inconceivably extravagant we already know the universe to be” (p 5). “All of these theories [of physics, such as string theory] tell us that it is the harmonics of superstring vibrations happening in the tenth spatial dimension that create the basic laws that define our reality–the strength of gravity, the charge, spin and nature of subatomic particles…It is the energy of these strings’ vibrations which is converted into mass” (p 5).

Bryanton walks us quickly through the initial build up of the dimensions, showing that 0D is a point, 1D is a straight line, 2D is a split, a branch into two lines, creating a plane, and 3D is a fold, which is “what we move through to get from one point to another in the dimension below” (p 11). Instead of adding a third dimension to space, creating a volume, like most do, Bryanton uses the fold to start us thinking about how we perceive reality differently from different dimensions, a mechanism he uses in the subsequent dimensions. So, the third dimension is how we can jump from one point to another in the perception of the second dimension.

He now repeats this pattern with the 4D being a line, which connects two points or states of existence of the 3D being. Two different states of you, for example, connected with a line, as perceived from 4D. 5D is a split, branching into different possible lines. You know one of those lines, which you live on as time, because that is the one you lived on, in your 3D experience of a 4D reality, branching in 5D. Which branch you experience is a function of choice and circumstance. 6D is then a fold into different worlds of branches you, as you experience yourself, did not take. The pattern then repeats, with 7D being a line of all possible timelines for the universe we experience, 8D is a split, and 9D is a fold. 10D consists of the vibrating strings that make up existence, according to string theory.

This is how Bryanton builds up an inner image of the experience of 10D reality. For the rest of the book, he looks at some implications of this image. Such as, what or who chooses the path we take at each branch in the 2D, 5D, and 8Ds? Is it you when you are aware, conditions when you are not, or a higher-order existence? He then explores the notion of time. Does time exist as a separate thing, a dimension, or is time what we call the experience of movement through the changing of energy states? If existence is full of energy everywhere, and energy moves, through power and work, then maybe the higher order dimensions of energy shifting states is what we call time, in our 3D experience of reality. And we only experience one line of shifts in form–our time–because that is the one we experienced. Time is what 3Ders, like us, call the experience of 4D. Bryanton also explores why the speed of light is constant, while Einstein found all other speeds to be relative. “In the ten dimensions as we’re imagining them, the speed of light is defined by interactions in a higher dimension than the one we live in. This is how it can be independent of how we move in the fourth dimensions.”

Through these explorations, Bryanton leads us to choice. “As creatures with free will, we are constantly moving through the fifth dimensional paths that are available to us, selecting one of those paths as our personal timeline…a life-changing decision or event that breaks old habits and old patterns will certainly direct a person’s life to a new trajectory, making other future paths more likely to be followed from that point on” (pp 118-119). Awareness matters. Choice makes a difference. And this is the link to ecosynomics, that choice makes a difference in the agreements we consciously enter, and that these agreements change everything. And, as I explored in an earlier blog, you already know all of this, from your own experience. The question is whether you use what you know to choose the agreements that influence the interactions that determine the experience and outcomes you achieve every day. With Bryanton’s enjoyable read, you have 10D glasses with which to perceive the multi-color, multi-possibility universe of choice before you. It is your choice whether or not you put on the 10D glasses.

I have been exploring many different perspectives on this question over the past few years. These perspectives are fascinating and I find many of them to be very seductive, pulling me into their orbits and convincing me of their perspective; until I dive into the next one. The realization of this exploratory confusion in me led me to begin to look for people who have mapped the topography of these explorations.

One of the most helpful mappings I have found of this huge space is George Makari‘s Soul Machine, “an attempt to untangle [the apparent] contradictions [amongst these perspectives] by returning to their origins…The emergence of the mind as a formative, if always embattled, belief, cannot be understood outside this historical context…this book recovers a lost lineage, parts of which have been long discarded as embarrassing, wrongheaded, or irrelevant” (pp. xi-xii). In the question of what is it to be human, Makari explores the evolution of our understanding of the mind (from PIE root *men- (1) “to think”), what is it that we experience that thinks?

“While our own psyches seem abundantly clear to us, attempts to objectively establish their existence have been mired in seemingly insoluble problems. And so, while the mind remains central to 21-century Western thought, a number of prominent neuroscientists and philosophers inform us that it surely does not exist” (p x).

“The invention of the mind was not the result of sedate academic debate. The mind was a radically destabilizing, heretical idea that grew out of intense, often violent conflict. Far from being a story of scholarship alone, this history begins and ends in bloodshed. Characters in this account include thinkers writing at their desks, but also wild-eyed prophets, doctors whose space rooms were littered with carcasses, political spies, bitter refugees, witches, quacks, and pornographers. This story takes place in universities, courts, hospitals, London coffeehouses and Paris salons, but also on battlefields, in lunatic asylums, poorhouses, and prisons. For better or worse, advocates and enemies of the mind were not sequestered in their studies. Often they could be found at the barricades” (p xi).

“Once modernity gave birth to the theory of an embodied mind, the implications were grave. If it wasn’t the soul but rather a fallible mind that made men and women think, choose, and act as thy did, then long-standing beliefs were erroneous. Convictions regarding truth and illusion, innocence and guilt, health and illness, the rulers and the ruled, and the roles of the individual in society would need to change. Not surprisingly, therefore, from its inception this concept was considered scandalous. Early advocates surrounded themselves in clouds of ambiguity; they published anonymously and when discovered, quickly fled from red-faced censors and mobs. Monarchs and theologians decried these heretics and roused their forces against them” (p xii).

This big book of over 600 pages chronicles this human exploration in the Western world over centuries, diving deep into the context of many of these explorers. Wading through it over the past month has given me much greater context for the Western explorers I have been reading, such as Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. It is very interesting to see how they all fit into overlapping contexts with each other. I highly recommend this deep dive, for those of you who like to dive deep. It could also serve you if you want to take a quick dive into the context of specific developers of our existing understanding of the mind.

In other words, we are all different, so the environment we each have, the systems and agreement structures that support each of us and we each support, should be designed to meet each of us. Well, that seems like a hard problem to solve.

It seems really hard to figure out how to meet everyone’s needs all of the time. Philosophers have been worrying about this for thousands of years. Is it better to let everyone figure this out for themselves, which free-market philosophers love, or is it better to calculate the best good for the most, which utilitarian-collectivist philosophers love, or is it best to make sure everyone gets the same treatment, whether it is great, good, or not so good, which egalitarian-justice philosophers love? While they all acknowledge that it would be better to satisfy everyone everywhere all of the time, it is just too hard to do, so they have developed self-acknowledged, suboptimal solutions, for which they have to make some rather radical simplifying assumptions. Well, they say, it works for many folks much of the time, which is better than nothing.

Maybe it is time to let go of this assumption that it is too hard to do. We have placed the robot Philae on a comet and the New Horizons probe has passed Pluto, while still sending back data and pictures over a very long distance. We have grown the world economy to over US$100 trillion, we generate about 4 billion tonnes of food a year, and we have created a network of roads extending over 20 million miles across the globe. These are amazing accomplishments, which we have achieved because people set themselves to figuring it out: they made it important. It was very hard to figure out, and they did. It took 100 years for a lot of people to figure out how to test part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but they did, and for that some of them won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

So if we can figure out these things, why can’t we figure out how to understand the needs of 7.6 billion people? They are right here, and we can ask. Maybe it is because we don’t think it is important enough to figure out. Maybe it is time we do, and maybe we now have many of the tools we will need to do so. And maybe some people are starting to figure this out, and we should find out what they are learning. We could start by understanding the memetic code of the agreements fields that most influence each of us, and then, like the influence of the genotype, epigenetic, and environmental factors, we could begin to understand the evolution of the metamemetics and epimemetics of the agreements fields that most influence each of us–how we unconsciously accept and consciously choose the interwoven set of mostly hidden agreements that most influence each of us. That might be a good start, one we could take now.

He starts with the observation that, “the initial condition of any creative act is collaboration…This cocktail of creativity and collaboration distinguishes our species–no other species has ever been able to do it so well–and has propelled the development of our bodies, minds, and cultures, both for good and for bad” (p 2). His research suggests that there are “four big misconceptions of human evolution:…we are the species that is supremely good at being bad; we are a species of supercooperators, supremely good at being good; [we are] a species still better adapted to traditional lives as hunter-gatherers than to modern, mechanized, urbanized, and tech-connected life; [or that we are] the Promethean breed, who, having made all the world our dominion, are now running it, and ultimately ourselves, into ruin” (p 3). He suggests that vast amounts of research in “anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, and sociology over the past twenty years” (p. 4) have shown these predominant arguments are at best incomplete. “Perhaps most important, these popular accounts have obscured the wonderful story at the heart of our evolution–the story of how, from the days of our earliest, protohuman ancestors, we have survived and increasingly thrived because of our exceptional capacity for creative collaboration” (p 4). “A new synthesis demonstrates that humans acquired a distinctive set of neurological, physiological, and social skills that enabled us, starting from the earliest days, to work together and think together in order to purposefully cooperate.

Professor Fuentes takes us on the long journey over two million years of how we evolved, through our increasing ability for creative collaboration, to the beings we are today. Along the way, he explores how we co-evolved with our environment through food, war, sex, religion, art, and science. As the capacity for collaboration, and how collaboration differs from pure competition or coopetition lies at the core of our work in ecosynomics, this look across the data from hundreds of communities and hundreds of thousands of years, highlights our innate capacities as Homo lumens. A very interesting, well written and documented read, which I highly recommend.

Our awareness of our agreements, of how we interact in community, invites our full engagement. “Participating is essential to the forming and the sustaining of community. If we take just the word “part,” it points only to the individual human being. But we must create this other aspect of “participation,” which is reciprocity, the exchange of the common good. This is the nature of the community, a process of exchanging with each other and cultivating something that I can’t create by myself. I can’t create something that complex by myself. It is a discovery that when we participate, the emergent quality is something that spontaneously reveals itself, that in the act of hosting and being hosted in this improvisation of devotion to some aspect of our human genius, we arrive at something that we couldn’t see beforehand. You could say that we share this “communion,” this wonderful substance. This is the “precipitation” of the spiritual substance of human life. It condenses, it manifests, and it becomes now tangible in the world. Participation is rain in the world (p. 208).”